![]() Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo (Canto IV). In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the mathematician Euclid, the scientist Pedanius Dioscorides, the statesman Cicero, the first doctor Hippocrates, the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Averroes and many others, including Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general (“in his armor, falcon-eyed”), Electra, Camilla, Latinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucretia, and Orpheus. Limbo includes green fields and a castle with seven gates to represent the seven virtues, the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Persian polymath Avicenna. Without baptism (“the portal of the faith that you embrace”) they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. Note that circle 8 consists of ten concentric subcircles. ![]() Follow Dante’s descent circle by circle through the eternal abode of lost souls, down to the pit of Hell at the center of the earth. To survive this ordeal, he must visit the three realms of the afterlife, beginning with Hell. Early in the spring of 1300, “midway along the road of our life,” Dante is lost and alone in a dark, foreboding forest. ![]()
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